I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 11

I Died Divorcing Him. Then I Woke Up Married Again. Chapter 11

Dying the second time was less frightening, mostly because I’d rehearsed it.

Here’s what nobody saw: the charcoal I’d swallowed in the car. The IV port taped under the strap of that green dress. The ambulance idling on Fifty-Second with a toxicologist in it who bills more per hour than my divorce attorney did.

Here’s what everybody saw: the wife collapsing on the marble in front of two hundred shareholders while

her husband went to his knees beside her and howled.

That part, Roman didn’t have to act. He told me afterward it was the worst ninety seconds of his life, and

he’d already lived through his father’s funeral.

I lay on the floor with my eyes shut and my pulse roaring and listened to the room detonate. Screaming. Chairs. Someone yelling for a doctor. Sloane’s boots. And under all of it, close, closer, the voice I was waiting for.

-stand back, everyone, give her air-” Julian, magnificently concerned, crouching. Then, lower, right at my

ear, pitched for one dead woman only:

“Six years and you still can’t hold your liquor.”

Keep going, I thought. Come on. You’ve been holding it in so long.

“He’ll be gone by Monday,” Julian breathed. “The board will have my letter in an hour-husband of the year, dead wife, second one this decade if you count Aunt Cecelia, and I do.” A soft laugh. “It was never personal, sweetheart. You were just inventory sitting on four percent of my company.”

There it was.

Twenty-one microphones in that room. The one taped to my sternum. The one in Nina’s updo. The four Sloane had zip-tied under the stage skirt at six a.m. The two the New York Times had legally installed in the press pit. The live Bloomberg feed that had been broadcasting the atrium since seven-thirty and was, at this exact moment, streaming to nine hundred thousand devices.

I opened my eyes.

“That’s the thing about inventory,” I said. “We count.”

I have never seen a human face do what Julian Vale’s face did.

He rocked back on his heels. 1 sat up on my elbows, green silk pooling, and two hundred people made a

sound like a wave hitting a seawall.

Roman stood, and helped me to my feet, and did not let go of my hand.

“Julian Vale,” he said, in a voice that carried to the glass ceiling, “at eight-fourteen this evening you handed my wife a glass of champagne containing forty milligrams of thallium sulfate. We have the waiter, who is in a van on Fifty-Second Street with two federal agents and a great deal to say. We have four months of recordings from Nina Reyes. We have the forensic report on the page you forged into our prenuptial agreement, and the payment trail from the Legacy Trust to a tabloid photo desk” He tilted his head. “And now, thanks to you, we have a confession at volume. Was it clear enough at the back, or shall I ask him to repeat it?”

The atrium was absolutely silent.

Then a phone flash went off. Then two hundred.

Julian rose slowly, brushing off his knees, and when he looked up, the charm had come off like a wet mask, and underneath was the thing that had crouched over my body while I died.

“You think this saves you?” he snarled. “You sanctimonious-she’s a nineteen-dollar-an-hour art clerk’s daughter, you burned a hundred-year company for a woman-”

“Yes,” said Roman calmly. “Keep going. It’s streaming.”

Julian lunged.

He didn’t get two steps. Sloane Marsh dropped her tray of canapés, took him by the wrist and the elbow and put the COO of Vale Group face-down on the marble hard enough to shake the champagne.

“Ma’am,” she said to me, pleasantly, kneeling on his spine, “I’ve been waiting eight months to do that.”

Julian shrieked something about lawyers into the floor.

Upstairs, the clock ticked past ten, and the vote was called forty minutes late, and it came back ninety-four percent in my husband’s favor.

But that’s not the part I remember.

The part I remember is looking at my phone at 11:52 p.m.-the exact minute I died, in the other life, in another green dress, on a different marble floor-and being alive.

I looked up.

Roman was watching me from across the room, and he’d gone white as paper.

“Ava,” he said. “How did you know it was tonight?”